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Practise sessions tedious?

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Wats peoples opinions on the practise sessions in career mode?
I personally appreciate the idea however find doing them very very tedious.
The race strategy goal is a complete waste of time.
I think next years game needs more variation in the practise session.
But also we dont want to be having extra chores to do in practise sessions.

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I find myself doing all programmes every weekend except the race strategy one. I think they're quite entertaining. What kind of variation are you proposing?

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I like it very, very much. There's a lot of things to do to help you on the race or even on qualify. It's awesome to know better your pace, or your flying lap, or how to economize fuel on the very first laps, etc. There's too much good things to do that will help us that is really fun.

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you wanted realism.... f1 drivers just drive round in laps in practice the number crunchers read the results of new parts and sometimes the drivers whine  about lacking grip/oversteer/understeer blah blah.

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I wish one could skip them and still get Research Points. Being forced to do them all to get RP is what's tedious.

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I dont see the point why the put the tryre and fuel managment in for when u do the trre and fuel on race stragergy so doing the samething twice im doing them all at min to get me force india into a title contention then once in good postion ill just do quali and race stragergy would of been good having practice race starts as it is a lot harder getting a good start something im still struggling with on 3rd season neverr had start where over took other cars 

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I love all practice programs, except fuel management. I do them all and I think they are useful. Track acclimatisation is very good to remember breaking points and get used to track again (it is the first I always do). Tyre management is awesome to put together lap time and smoothness drive (always the second one I do).

Race Strategy I try to do twice, with two different compounds. However sometimes there is no time left to do the second run.

Qualy sim is very useful to understand if you are as fast as your team expect.

I didn't get this coast thing in fuel management. I only can pass it using short shifting. This one I do only because of resource points.

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Honestly I use them only to reach points for r&d...mine practice are much more useful...searching and laps for the perfect setup and then try all tires to see how they go with my car...

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I like them and they make for interesting challenges but I think they need to be better calibrated to the AI's pace though but that's my only criticism.

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I must admit I quite like the practice sessions and the programmes to earn R&D.

They give me time to test my set up, build my pace, as well as being a moderate challenge that benefits me with the aforementioned R&D points...though I must agree with Saulo that the fuel management program is not good.

It makes zero sense to me as there is never a need to under fuel my car and I find the times you need to beat unrealistic at some circuits, especially when you need to do some serious lifting, coasting, short shifting etc...to get the fuel bar to stay in the green and up near purple.

That aside, the rest are good for learning set ups, track layout etc...plus I don't necessarily always complete a whole race weekend in one sitting anyway, but if I do it ends up a fairly good bit of escapism going through the 3 practice sessions, then a short qualifying and then a 25% race, and so I have to say I am liking the new format.

If I get bored I like to race a few 5 lap sprints in the classic cars too, for some variety.

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Practice programmes and collecting data is part of real f1 and is used as a gameplay mechanic. Some of them are meant to teach you the track and how to use your tires and fuel, other are there to let the game make you a race strategy. 

It makes no sense if you would have an option to just skip them and have free RP.

If you don't like the system, then career mode is not for you.

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They were one of my favourite inclusions to F1 2016 as they gave me a reason to care about practice sessions. I'm glad that we got more of them in F1 2017.

To me they only became tedious once I started grinding for my final Achievement in the game (75% of all car upgrades applied); before then they felt like a good way to refamiliarise myself with a track and prepare for Qualifying/Race.

I like the idea of these however but I would like to see even more of them added to F1 2018. Perhaps we could have some programmes related to different car setups the engineers want us to try, so that we can find out which is faster and help optimise our setups or something.

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I'm in to season 2 and think there should be away of taking away track acclaimtisation because I'd assume we all know the tracks by then...

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CmdrCody said:
I wish one could skip them and still get Research Points. Being forced to do them all to get RP is what's tedious.

While we are at it why don't they just hand out a million R&D points at the start of the season.... Cmon, really? " I want a more realistic game but only the bits i like". I.R.L all teams have practice programs to run thu and you will often hear from a team if they have missed a practice due to a fault  "that put us back a bit, we didn't get to run all the programs we needed too." i think there should be more programs and only some you can do in certain practices... I.E  the track acclimatisation program and fuel saving  in P1, the race strategy and a new program (lets say youve just had a new aero package installed, a 3 lap program to see its performance) in P2 and the tyre and quali programs in P3 when the track has more rubber down. 

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It's a snoozefest when you know it's simply all about getting those obligatory 30 laps in for the sake of a few points. I liked it better in the old games where there was no such gamey incentive and I could focus on doing the practice sessions in a realistic manner, especially since the track grip unrealistically skyrockets between FP3 and Q1 to the point where any sort of practice you may get before that ends up being worthless. At least it's better than 2016 in that sense, but that's not saying much. This is now the second CM F1 game in a row that I've mostly stopped playing solo as a result of getting bored less than halfway through my first season, and the practice sessions being as they are is one of the reasons for it.

The worst offender is probably the fuel test, which is absolutely worthless as underfueling is severely underpowered in this game. The fact that it usually only takes a handful of laps to get the setup right in this game only makes things worse. The best improvement would have to be tests like that and the tyre wear one only requiring one lap, but ideally you shouldn't need them at all as that's what the race simulations are for (and unsurprisingly the race strategy tests do indeed track those things). You should also be given the chance to do more than 5 laps in a race simulation tests and they should give you more detailed information - the tyre wear graph is worthless on tracks where the wear is mostly focused on one tyre for instance (such as China and Silverstone). Above all else though, I think they absolutely need to remove resource points as a whole and come up with something less gamey.

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Coffer said:
 The best improvement would have to be tests like that and the tyre wear one only requiring one lap
If you get purple on the first lap there is no need to complete the rest of the laps. Tyre Management, Fuel Efficiency and Qualifying pace abort themselves as soon as you get purple. For track acclimatisation/race strategy you can pull into the pits once you get purple and don't need to complete the laps.

Having said that, I agree that fuel management feels kinda pointless. I actually ran underfueled at Bahrain and got my a** kicked by a country mile. Now I just run full pelt, as do the AI.

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Coffer said:
 The best improvement would have to be tests like that and the tyre wear one only requiring one lap
If you get purple on the first lap there is no need to complete the rest of the laps. Tyre Management, Fuel Efficiency and Qualifying pace abort themselves as soon as you get purple. For track acclimatisation/race strategy you can pull into the pits once you get purple and don't need to complete the laps.

Having said that, I agree that fuel management feels kinda pointless. I actually ran underfueled at Bahrain and got my a** kicked by a country mile. Now I just run full pelt, as do the AI.
I mean compared to 2016. In 2016 you would still need multiple purple laps for the tyre wear test from what I remember (extremely tedious on 100% race length where you couldn't even stop after getting 8 purples and thus had enough points for the purple score), and the qualifying test would only end in one lap if your predicted lap was good enough for pole (which it often was in the Manor on Ultimate by the time I reached Baku, but not always). The acclimatization one also ends in one lap if you nail everything perfectly, which I usually do unless the intended racing line is extremely bad (Baku last year).

And yeah, I don't run full, but I do run what the game recommends for me at the start based on my 3 race strategy test runs, and that usually works very well for me. In multiplayer where you don't have to care about component reliability I'd quite likely go full though, as the added weight simply doesn't cost you as much pace as it should.

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CmdrCody said:
I wish one could skip them and still get Research Points. Being forced to do them all to get RP is what's tedious.

While we are at it why don't they just hand out a million R&D points at the start of the season.... Cmon, really? " I want a more realistic game but only the bits i like". I.R.L all teams have practice programs to run thu and you will often hear from a team if they have missed a practice due to a fault  "that put us back a bit, we didn't get to run all the programs we needed too." i think there should be more programs and only some you can do in certain practices... I.E  the track acclimatisation program and fuel saving  in P1, the race strategy and a new program (lets say youve just had a new aero package installed, a 3 lap program to see its performance) in P2 and the tyre and quali programs in P3 when the track has more rubber down. 
Yeah, if they had pay to win I bet there'd be more people buying RP than grinding for it. 

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather do the practice sessions.

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CmdrCody said:
I wish one could skip them and still get Research Points. Being forced to do them all to get RP is what's tedious.

While we are at it why don't they just hand out a million R&D points at the start of the season....
Nobody's saying that. Just that it would be nice to be able to skip the practice sessions in return for (say) 50% of the available research points, or some percentage of the number of points you got last season on that circuit. So it would still be worth doing them, but not disastrous when you can't be bothered.

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It's certainly baffling to be doing track acclimatisation laps on circuits that I have done thousands of laps in the past... Even on this game, by season 10 a player could have presumably done 1000 of each circuit just on F12017 and is being asked to acclimatise?!!!.  My preference would be for only the Race Strategy and  the Qually challenge obv. Doing the acclimatisation plus the fuel and tyre tests seem pointless. I currently skip those which slows down my development rate, (which is actually fine, I'm in a Ferrari and its competitive anyway). 

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CmdrCody said:
I wish one could skip them and still get Research Points. Being forced to do them all to get RP is what's tedious.

While we are at it why don't they just hand out a million R&D points at the start of the season....
Nobody's saying that. Just that it would be nice to be able to skip the practice sessions in return for (say) 50% of the available research points, or some percentage of the number of points you got last season on that circuit. So it would still be worth doing them, but not disastrous when you can't be bothered.
Given that all the other teams that you don't drive for during your career develop automatically, I think an "automatic development" option should exist. That's painfully obvious. You'd just get the development rate that team would get if you weren't driving for it. 

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Its gotten so mundane to me now that i drop the difficuty for practice and just run through the motions to get the resource points.

One lap for the fuel, tire, qualy and acclimatization. Once i pass the line and its purple i hit start and go back to garage.

Then i do 3 laps for race strategy, pass the line, its purple, hit start and back to garage.

Then i crank the difficulty up to 101 and do qually and the race.

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